John Irving is the only normal one for pointing this out

Presuming to speak for most of us, I'll just say that we seem to maintain the delicate balance of our lives reasonably certain that almost everyone else in the world is lunatic, and that it is our duty to future generations to stand as a bulwark in the face of all the madness. Appearances can be so tiresome. And every so often, a book — a book! — gives you license to just give up the game, for fk's sake. Good for us that John Irving has always had a lovely and highly entertaining way of demonstrating just how crazy we all are. In his thirteenth novel, In One Person (Simon & Schuster, $28), Irving goes out on a limb and writes about the subject of debilitating sexual differences. Of course, Irving has written a lot about debilitating sexual differences his entire career, or at least ever since the nicely adjusted transsexual Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp. It is important to add that with Irving it is most often not the sexually different who are the debilitated ones but those around them. In fact, Irving's life could be described as a noble campaign to define deviancy out of existence. Billy Abbott, his latest protagonist, possesses a difference that is hardly different at all. He's gay. Or a "bi-guy," as Irving says. A bi-guy who came of age before AIDS and who becomes a full-fledged deviant, or perfectly normal person, during the epidemic. With that, In One Person marks a milestone for Irving, a tipping point, to use that ruined phrase: From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones — the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell — who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs. Oh, don't think you'll get away without transsexuals — there are transsexuals — but In One Person is a rich and absorbing book, even beautiful, and probably the most different book of Irving's long career. One might guess that he queued up this book special, just in time to snuff out the last gasp of homosexual panic in the American polity (last, that is, until the next one), to achieve a novel ripped from the culture wars. But when reached on the phone at his house in Vermont, he says no.

Most Popular

"In my case, there are always these novels, three or four, that I am going to write, and they are like boxcars in a station. They're kind of waiting around, and I never know which of those boxcars is going to leave the station," he says. "I never try to predetermine these things. In some cases, these are stories that are fully formed, that may have been waiting to be the next novel for 20 years. Twisted River was hanging around for that length of time before I wrote it. Until I Find You was hanging around for that length of time before I wrote it. In One Person was also fully formed. It had been in my head for seven, almost eight years before I began to write it in June 2009. And yet when I began it, I never would have guessed even a week before that it would be the next one. It may seem to a reader who takes to this novel now, especially with the rampant homophobia among the Republican candidates for president, that it may be a timely moment for this boxcar to leave the station. But I don't work that way." He laughs. "The book that becomes the next one for me is the one in which the ending is the most fully formed. I always know that ending before I begin. I have that written, and then I begin at the beginning and make my way there through some pretty intricate turns.

"As for a novel that deals with sexuality as a predominant theme, I must say that when I began I thought, This again? But then, when you look at us, and you see just how utterly juvenile we are about all things sexual, you say with conviction Yes, this again." This again, this always.

It's hard to compare Irving to anybody else, and why would you want to? A major literary figure who has always been somehow outside the milieu of such things, who writes large books exalting marginal figures because we are all marginal figures. Thirty years ago, Billy would have been so different as to be dangerous. But the world, at last, seems to be catching up with John Irving.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

--

Below, read an extended conversation between John Irving and Mark Warren about In One Person.

ESQUIRE: Why In One Person, why now? Where does the main character, Billy Abbott, come from?

JOHN IRVING: I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station. When I began In One Person in June of 2009, I never would have guessed just a week before that it was the next novel. There were novels in my head that had been waiting longer. So the "now" word is deceptive. It may seem, given the rampant homophobia among Republicans running for president, that it may be a timely moment for this boxcar to move itself out of the station, but I don't work that way.

So forget about the now. My Vietnam novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was published in 1989, quite a number of years after the end of the Vietnam War in April of '75. My abortion novel, The Cider House Rules, was purposely set back in time, not only long before Roe v. Wade, but at that period of time when orphanages were prevalent in New England, and where — in the '30s and '40s, before antibiotics, when the only procedure for an abortion was a D&C, and a lot of them were performed in orphanages. I purposely chose to make it historical, to basically say, Okay, so you want to go back to these wonderful days? Here's a novel in which everything that happens happens because this procedure is illegal, unavailable, and unsafe. And if you make this procedure legal, available, and safe, nothing in this story ever happens — nothing, these people don't exist.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion. If In One Person is timely, it's a fucking accident. Not to put too fine a point on it.

I don't think sexual outsiders, or sexual misfits, are particularly new to my novels. Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules has sex once and stops for life. That's a little strange. Jenny Fields, Garp's mother, does the same thing. Those are eccentric sexual choices. More eccentric, I would argue, than Billy Abbott's in In One Person. There's Frank, the gay brother in The Hotel New Hampshire, kind of the brains of the family. There are the gay twins, separated at birth, in A Son of the Circus, who have nothing in common but for the fact that they're gay, which is a lot to have in common. And so when you say, "Where does Billy come from?" — he comes from all of these other guys that I've been writing about frequently, not least the narrator of A Prayer for Owen Meany, who is called — behind his back and to his considerable irritation — a "non-practicing homosexual." But the truth about Johnny Wheelright is that he looks like one of the gay guys from my generation who not only isn't out of the closet, he wouldn't ever admit that he's in the closet. Billy's voice was a lot easier to write in because he's so out. But Billy has a long ancestry in my work.

I was living in New York in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic began. I lost friends to early death. In One Person is dedicated in part to one of them, Tony Richardson. All of my characters, in all of my novels, are on a collision course. In this novel, AIDS is the collision in waiting.

One coincidence did force this novel ahead of all the others waiting in my head. The novelist Edmund White and I were exchanging emails during the May-June 2009 period when I was about to begin writing on something else. "What are you working on now?" he asked. It turned out we were both beginning novels at the same time. (He writes faster than I do — he finished Jack Holmes and His Friend before I finished In One Person.) And I was at that point when I wasn't sure what to write. I ended up telling him much more about a novel I didn't start, but I did include a side note about this one. I mentioned the beginning relationship between Billy and Ms. Frost, about a boy who falls in love with a transsexual whom he doesn't know is a transsexual, and that this is the pivotal relationship in his life that informs all the others that he will have. But then I said, "But I don't think I'm going to write this one now, because I know it's a first-person novel, and I don't like to write in the first-person," and that I was confused about who was the most important character and who was the main character. That same mistake prevented me from writing Cider House Rules for several years.

So I was bitching in an email to Edmund, saying, "Oh God, this novel is impossible. I don't like writing from the point-of-view of the transgender woman. I can't do it." And Edmund wrote back, just as an aside to something else: "Why aren't you writing from the point-of-view of the boy, Billy Abbott?"

And I remember clearly — I was on this island in Canada that I live on in the summers — and one morning I went down with the dog, and saw the thing from Edmund, innocently asking his question. And I went back up to the main cabin — a walk of about five minutes — and by the time I got there, I knew exactly what I needed to be doing.

ESQ: Some of the sexual differences in some of your other novels are seen in the times in which the novels take place as so aberrant. But Billy's difference is not so different. And he's so angry and self-knowing and kind of fearless. Do we improve over time? Are we growing up and changing, at last?

JI: Well, as you say, The World According to Garp, for instance, is a much more radical polarization story about sexual differences. It's a novel in which a woman, Garp's mother, is murdered by a man who hates women, and her son, Garp himself, is murdered by a woman who hates men. It was always a very radical and cynical view of our retrograde view of sex. It was written in the late 1970s, and it said, essentially, Oh, you think we're so liberated sexually. Well, I don't think so. Men and women still treat each other like shit. And I was naïve enough when I finished The World According to Garp to think, Well, whatever you write about in the future, you're not going to write about this stupid subject again. This is going to go away. There isn't going to be any more intolerance for sexual differences. Well, that was obviously a joke. I got that wrong. This book is essentially about the same subject, not as radicalized, which is why Billy is more recognizable, more "normal." So we change, yes, but at a shockingly slow pace. Tolerance for abortion rights, for instance, is worse today that it was in '85 when I published Cider House Rules. And opposition to it — and to women in general — is more incendiary now than ever.

The troglodytes will always be enflamed by behavior that is sexually unacceptable to them. Intolerance for gays comes from the same fount that says that if you're young and you get knocked up before you're married, you should Pay. The. Price. Penalize it. Long before there was all this right-to-life bullshit on behalf of the fetus, there was that. There were and apparently always will be the anti-promiscuity people. The same people who viewed the AIDS epidemic as a rightful and just plague. Think of them. When I hear the ad nauseum mismemory of Ronald Reagan that is preached to us daily by young conservatives who were not politically conscious when Reagan was president, it makes me sick. And he was an absent president during a time of profound crisis. And think of it: Did we ever have a president who personally knew more gay people than Reagan? He came from Hollywood, and many of his friends were affected, and he didn't give a shit about it.

Before I wrote In One Person, I thought, Oh, for God's sake, not this again. But then I look at who and what we are, and I just knew, Yes, this again. This for as long as it takes. For as long as this rich story continues to tell itself.

I can think of few countries — especially civilized countries — that are as juvenile, utterly puerile, as ours, sexually.